Unity 5 Officially Announced, with Plenty of New Features and Improvements

Unity Technologies has officially announced Unity 5 at GDC today, to be released later this year. Unity 5 will contain a slew of new features, along with upgrades and optimizations to existing ones. Some of the major changes include the move to a 64-bit editor, a new multi-threaded job system, real-time global illumination via Enlighten, physically based shading, an upgrade to NVIDIA PhysX 3.3, a complete audio overhaul, early access to a WebGL add-on, and a new GUI system. Unity 5 will also bring with it the launch Unity Cloud, which allows mobile developers to utilize ads, cross-promotions, and more without the need for third-party SDK. All these features and many more are shown in the Unity 5 Feature Preview video below:

Unity 5 is currently available for pre-order from the Unity store, with varying prices depending on whether you have a current Unity Pro license. As per the norm, there will be a free version of Unity 5, but obviously there's no pre-ordering for it. The new GUI system will also be included in Unity 4.6, which has officially been announced as the last major update for the Unity 4 cycle, arriving this Spring. If you happen to be attending GDC this week, you can stop at the Unity booth to see a demo of Madfinger Games' Dead Trigger 2 running on WebGL, the JavaScript API that doesn't require plug-ins in most modern browsers.